AVP, Principal Data Engineer (L11)

Job Description:

Role Title: AVP, Principal Data Engineer (L11)

Company Overview:

Synchrony (NYSE: SYF) is a premier consumer financial services company delivering one of the industry’s most complete digitally enabled product suites. Our experience, expertise and scale encompass a broad spectrum of industries including digital, health and wellness, retail, telecommunications, home, auto, outdoors, pet and more.

• We have recently been ranked #2 among India’s Best Companies to Work for by Great Place to Work. We were among the Top 50 India’s Best Workplaces in Building a Culture of Innovation by All by GPTW and Top 25 among Best Workplaces in BFSI by GPTW. We have also been recognized by AmbitionBox Employee Choice Awards among the Top 20 Mid-Sized Companies, ranked #3 among Top Rated Companies for Women, and Top-Rated Financial Services Companies.

• Synchrony celebrates ~51% women diversity, 105+ people with disabilities, and ~50 veterans and veteran family members.

• We offer Flexibility and Choice for all employees and provide best-in-class employee benefits and programs that cater to work-life integration and overall well-being. 

• We provide career advancement and upskilling opportunities, focusing on Advancing Diverse Talent to take up leadership roles

Organizational Overview:

This role will be part of the Data Architecture & Analytics group part of CTO organization.

• Data team is responsible for designing and developing scalable data pipelines for efficient data ingestion, transformation, and loading(ETL).

• Data team owns and manages different tools platforms which provides an environment for designing and building different data solutions.

• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to integrate new data sources and ensure data quality and consistency.

• Building and maintaining data models to facilitate data access and analysis by Data Scientists and Analysts

Role Summary/Purpose:

We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer with Product owner Experience as well as to provide technical leadership for the development of Data warehouse and Data Lake applications supporting key business domains. This role will be instrumental in transforming the legacy systems to modern data platforms. This role is an exciting, fast-paced, constantly changing, and challenging work environment, and will play an important role in resolving and influencing high-level decisions across Synchrony.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop and lead data engineering applications in highly agile and fast moving teams.

• Lead a data engineering team and roll up the sleeves to individually contribute when required.

• Implement ETL/ELT on a Data warehouse applications using Ab Initio  and on a data lake platform(Cloudera Hadoop cluster)/ Container using Ab Initio, Spark, Hive, Kafka, RDBMS(Oracle, MySQL), NoSQL databases(Cassandra), and public cloud solutions.

• Responsible for design, development, testing oversight and production implementation.

• Experience with batch and real-time data pipelines in a DevOps environment using Ab Initio and Spark.

• Partner with architects to efficiently design data applications with scalability, resiliency and speed.

• Lead data engineering team to drive program delivery.

• Drive technical development and application standards across enterprise data lake

• Accomplish results by communicating expectations; planning, monitoring, and appraising results; coaching, counseling, and disciplining employees; developing, coordinating, and enforcing systems, policies, procedures, and productivity standards.

• Collaborate across cross-functional teams to improve and deliver on business objectives and priorities.

• Apply technical knowledge, industry experience, expertise, and insights to contribute to the development & exe

• Stays up-to-date on latest trends in data engineering, recommends best practices, develops innovative frameworks to avoid redundancy by promoting automation.

• Create and prioritization the product backlog (a list of features with requirements) that aligns with product vision and goals and continuously refining it based on feedback and changing the business needs.

• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams (e.g., data engineers, data architects, solution architects and quality assurance) to ensure that the product meets customer needs, and it delivered on time and within budget.

• Ensure that product with complaint with all the relevant with regulations and standards and managing any legal/ethical considerations related to the product.

• Define and manage the product vision and strategy based on customer and stakeholders needs and market research.

• Ensure the product backlog items are clearly defined, well understood, and properly estimated with help of engineering team.

• Participate in Scrum ceremonies (backlog grooming, planning, daily standard-up, retros and PI planning session).

Required Skills/Knowledge:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or similar technical field of study with minimum of 6 years of work experience, or in lieu of a degree 8+ years of work experience.

• Minimum 6+ years of experience in managing large scale data platforms (Data warehouse/Data Lake/Cloud) environments.

• Minimum 6+ years’ of programming experience in ETL tools - Ab Initio or Informatica and Data Lake Technologies - Hadoop, Spark, HDFS, Hive.

• Minimum 4+ Prior experience as a Data Engineering Technical Lead/Product owner leading team in Scaled Agile framework

• Hands on experience with ETL tools - Ab Initio or Informatica and Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Kafka and other data lake technologies.

• Working knowledge of cloud platforms such as S3, Redshift, Snowflake, etc.

• Familiar with scheduling tools like Stonebranch.

• Strong familiarity with data governance, data lineage, data processes, DML, and data architecture control execution.

• Hands on experience in writing shell scripts and complex SQL queries

• Proficient with databases such as MySQL, Oracle, Teradata.

Desired Skills/Knowledge:

• Scaled Agile framework PM/PO certification preferred.

• Prior experience as a Data Engineering Technical Lead leading team in Scaled Agile framework.

• Experience owning multiple mission critical applications on data platform.

• Experience with batch and real-time data pipelines in a DevOps environment.

• Must be willing to work in a fast-paced environment with globally located Agile teams working in different shifts.

• Ability to develop and maintain strong collaborative relationships at all levels across IT and Business Stakeholders.

• Excellent written and oral communication skills. Adept and presenting complex topics, influencing, and executing with timely /actionable follow-through.

• Experience in designing ETL pipelines to enable automated data load into AWS S3 & Redshift.

• Prior work experience in a Credit Card/Banking/Fin Tech company.

• Experience dealing with sensitive data in a highly regulated environment.

• Demonstrated implementation of complex and innovative solutions.

• Nice to have AWS Solution Architect/Data Engineer certification.

Eligibility Criteria:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or similar technical field of study with minimum of 6 years of work experience, or in lieu of a degree 8+ years of work experience.

Work Timings: 3PM to 12 AM IST

(This role qualifies for Enhanced Flexibility and Choice offered in Synchrony India and will require the incumbent to be available between 06:00 AM Eastern Time – 11:30 AM Eastern Time (timings are anchored to US Eastern hours and will adjust twice a year locally). This window is for meetings with India and US teams. The remaining hours will be flexible for the employee to choose. Exceptions may apply periodically due to business needs. Please discuss this with the hiring manager for more details.)

For Internal Applicants:

• Understand the criteria or mandatory skills required for the role, before applying

• Inform your manager and HRM before applying for any role on Workday

• Ensure that your professional profile is updated (fields such as education, prior experience, other skills) and it is mandatory to upload your updated resume (Word or PDF format)

• Must not be any corrective action plan (First Formal/Final Formal, PIP)

• L9+ Employees who have completed 18 months in the organization and 12 months in current role and level are only eligible.

• L09+ Employees can apply

Grade/Level: 11

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